Orson Welles

Will Eisner did it better

new essay collection

http://filmint.nu/?p=24970

i'd missed the Oja Kodar/Gary Graver commentary on Criterion's F for Fake til now... I think Oja comes off better than she necessarily does onscreen in the last two films.

Touch of Evil was greaton the big screen

xpost There's a good and fairly recent ( last couple of years?) Rosenbaum intvw with her on Youtube

The NYC Quad (if they aren't shut by noise complaints) is doing a Welles acting-for-hire series that includes some things I've never heard of (a Chabrol film co-starring Anthony Perkins).

https://quadcinema.com/program/actor-for-hire-the-other-side-of-orson-welles/

My noise complaints about the Quad are mainly to do with the subway drowning out the soundtrack every ten minutes or so

That's the old Quad, Tracer... I haven't found that to be a problem since the renovation.

AHHH I am obsolete :(

That Chabrol is ... pas trés bon.

It's an intensely programmed rep/indie house now, not the place where every bad queer movie opens. xp

Stunned by the criticism of Tim Holt's performance in Ambersons itt and others. That's one of the most inspired casting choices ever, and a brilliant performance - the type of second/third generation inherited wealthy kid, totally oblivious, entitled, insulated, and crucially - fey and feckless, emasculated. The way his voice cracks when he's angry. His stubborn indignance and ignorance. I kept thinking about Brett Kavanaugh watching Holt in Ambersons. It's a type I recognize from school but rarely depicted in movies, as far as I know.

Yesterday was the first time I saw it, fantastic and better than Kane at points, but those last 20-30 minutes hurt so much.

I grade Magnificent Ambersons like rock-climbers grade routes. The most challenging/brilliant stretch is the grade for the entirety.

At its peaks, it's better than Kane.

Yep.

Holt's inadequacies help his performance.

btw Molly Haskell

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6061-what-is-and-what-might-have-been

The Mark Cousins' documentary THE EYES OF ORSON WELLES is currently available to stream or download on the BBC iplayer.

Last year at the Edinburgh Festival Cousins' helped put on a small but pleasing selection of Welles' art - drawings, sketches, cartoons, paintings, storyboards etc. Welles definitely had some flair for illustration - there was one spectacularly bad oil painting of Don Quixote.

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/0ebfaab0-e4b0-4451-b6ab-00d7947c407d-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/4735ee24-a263-4402-986f-61c678767a92-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

https://beta-static.photobucket.com/images/aa362/Andrew_Littlefield/0/236bb8db-c80a-4a33-b190-e504f124ab3a-original.jpg?width=1920&height=1080&fit=bounds

Apparently Orson Welles's flair for art was what got him involved in theatre at the age of 16. After he talked his dad into letting him come to Ireland to practise his art, he wound up involved at the Ambassador theatre claiming to be a well known actor from the States.

scroll up to the youtube links above of "Orson Welles Sketchbook" for clips of his drawing skills in action

oh wow! shades of quentin blake in falstaff there

Had the same thought

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpHfVjOeCc0

The opening 3 minutes of Ambersons reminded me what a bootjack is.

I've watched six of these for the last hour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT-nPWT-vVk

watched The Lady from Shanghai today... christ, pick an accent

Loo

he did

always after me Lucky Charms

Lol (let me check that i spelled it correctly this time)

The 1939 Welles radio adap of Ambersons on the Criterion is quite something -- only an hour (probably 45 mins w/out the Campbell Soup ads), Orson plays Georgie Minafer seemingly on the edge of hysteria. There's stuff he carries over to the film -- the townspeople chorus have nearly the exact lines, and they sing "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo" on the sleigh ride (in Tarkington's book it was The Star-Spangled Banner). Walter Huston plays Eugene Morgan. Ray Collins is the uncle as he is in the movie. No Aunt Fanny!

The other supps delineate almost exhaustively who directed and DP'd what scenes (OW's *business manager* even got in on the reshoot action). Bernard Herrmann was the only collaborator who had his name taken off it in protest, after they fucked with his music by cutting huge swaths of it out (along w/ whole scenes).

Should I try to watch Black Magic before it disappears from MUBI?

Why don’t you spend Orson Welles’ birthday watching The Fountain of Youth, the pilot, made for Desilu Productions, that would have been an anthology show featuring him as an almost always present host (no, it wasn’t picked up, but it won a Peabody) https://t.co/IeLziO1AZn

— Matt Prigge (@mattprigge) May 6, 2019

Orson Welles, the year before his death, doing a reading from Charles Lindbergh's flight journals for The Other Side of the Wind DP Gary Graver's camera. He's in full hamhock mode, and the result is... astonishingly moving! https://t.co/VvDj603umF

— 𝖇𝖎𝖌 𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖔𝖓 𝖆𝖉𝖛𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖗𝖊 (@NickPinkerton) April 4, 2020

Great find!

Who is the “Bill” referred to?

no idea

Wiki:

The film was intended as a private video letter from Welles to his longtime friend and accountant Bill Cronshaw, who was ill.

think of what a draining job being his accountant must've been

Welles had a voice and he knew how to make the most of it. If you had another actor reproduce every vocal inflection in that performance, but an actor with a voice less resonant, with a different timbre, and it would sound unbearably artificial.

And an hour later, another take, Welles would've been phony too -- that's the rub. His voice was his blessing and curse.

That moment when your daughter is getting her 1st spa treatment from the baby nurse & you realize the teenage years are going to be REALLY expensive. (We’re still home! This is from two days ago. In spite of everything, there were also sweet, happy moments worth remembering. 💜) pic.twitter.com/E7WGkWkS2s

— Red Stethoscope (@RedStethoscope) April 4, 2020

this baby looks like welles imo

Better that than Winston Churchill.

lolz

How's that Hignam book? It's the only one of the major critical bios I haven't read.

Higham? i read chunks of it in HS, so i dont recall.

"The one generalization which is true about America is that everything is true about it. It's impossible to say anything that isn't true, good or bad. Our enemies are right. Our friends are right." -- Orson Welles

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) July 4, 2020

This is pretty great. The man seems at times lost amidst all these young cinephiles but he works his charm. Mostly French, no subs. https://www.cinematheque.fr/henri/film/125173-orson-welles-a-la-cinematheque-francaise-pierre-andre-boutang-guy-seligmann-1983/

that line from Picasso is great

Not 100% sure it's legit (or he got it from Leger) but that's Orson The Raconteur for ya.

revisiting Lady From Shanghai...the trial section is a riot

I looked at their filmographies, and this checks out:

Something I've noted recently, the case of two previously workmanlike cinematographers--Russell Metty and Charles Lawton, Jr.--who both went Godmode after working with Welles, on The Stranger (1946) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947), respectively. The man elevated people's game!

— 💜💜𝔹𝔼 𝕊𝔸ℕ𝔻 ℕ𝕆𝕋 𝕆𝕀𝕃💜💜 (@NickPinkerton) August 23, 2020

I don't remember The Stranger looking good but I probably watched a crappy public domain copy.